And they all aren’t created equal
By Fabrice Beer-Gabel, Vice President, Strategy & Partnerships, Intent IQ
The “cookiepocalypse” isn’t coming, it’s already here. And a few advertisers have already figured out how to turn it into a big win..
Over 150 million iPhone users and 37 million desktop users of Firefox, Safari and Edge browsers are already cookieless. As a result, marketers are no longer able to drive one-to-one conversations with their most valuable customers across all platforms and devices. Instead, they’re left to chase a smaller universe of available customers, often underperforming against campaign KPIs.
Midway through last year, the last and largest bastion of the “old” cookie world, Google, announced a plan to offer customers a path to opt into cookie tracking or adopt the company’s new privacy sandbox. The inevitable opt-outs to follow will leave advertisers with even more uncertainty around the scale and speed at which cookies will disappear from Google’s ecosystem. Other privacy-preserving strategies are also rolling out in the world of mobile apps.
As the new year begins, advertisers need to take the opportunity to determine their post-cookie path forward, one that can be riddled with pot holes: Many companies lack the scaled datasets needed to find their audiences effectively; a lack of interoperability between buyer and seller datasets limits reach; match rate accuracy lacks transparency; and cookieless measurement remains a key challenge.
Alternative IDs have emerged as a promising pathway to tackle these challenges, Marketers can now choose from dozens of different alternative IDs, all of which claim to mirror or even improve upon the performance of a third-party cookie across prospecting and remarketing tactics, while also maintaining customer privacy. The promise is enticing: immediately expanding reach to 180 million+ iPhone and other cookieless users and reaping the benefits of the enhanced performance of a highly desirable audience that delivers lower effective CPMs and higher conversion rates than audiences reached with cookies.
What’s the catch? There are huge differences in the performance and commercial models offered by each solution. To stay ahead of the competition and thrive in the coming year, advertisers will need to look more closely at these new tools to see which is the best fit for their business and which can actually deliver results.
A privacy-safe cookie replacement
So what are alternative ID’s? In a broad sense, these identifiers are used to represent an audience in real time via the bid stream. They’re placed in bid requests by ad sellers to allow ad buyers to make transactional decisions using the audience data they have for these IDs. These new privacy-safe ID’s include regulatory guardrails that respect user consent and offer a unique combination of privacy and addressability that can benefit consumers, marketers and publishers. The IDs use several different signals — including hashed email addresses and first-party cookies — to create a persistent identifier. Because they can be built from a combination of both deterministic and probabilistically enhanced (synthetic) data, scale and accuracy can vary greatly as can the performance of campaigns that rely on them.
What should marketers be looking for?
The differences between alternative IDs can feel overwhelming—how can an advertiser know which one to use? This confusion and chaos of choice can actually be an opportunity though—to innovate, to differentiate, and to drive better outcomes by reaching previously unreachable audiences.
Here’s what advertisers should inquire about, and experiment with, when choosing an alternative ID:
- Scale: In terms of both available inventory and audience reach, how much scale does the alternative ID offer? How many cookieless users can be reached? On how many sites and apps can these users be reached? And with what bid request density?
- Accuracy: Equally important to scale, accuracy forms the foundation for trust and transparency across the ecosystem. Without it, campaigns cannot perform, no matter their scale. Ultimately, the best proof of accuracy is a campaign’s bottom of funnel performance. A few simple questions can help assess the potential for success before even running a campaign. How does the vendor measure the accuracy of the alternative ID? Is this measurement deterministic? How frequently is it measured and does it account for constantly changing digital signals? Can the ID accurately map to a desired household, a desired user, device or browser? An alternative ID that is limited to browser level matching will struggle to accurately identify the same user across browsers, apps or devices.
- End-to-end Interoperability: How does the alternative ID integrate with the advertiser’s existing tactics and tech stack? Is it easily deployable and available on your DSP to build audiences, activate campaigns and measure performance? How is first-party data onboarded and what third-party data enrichment and lookalike modeling are available? Does it support site retargeting of cookieless users, performance CTV (i.e. retargeting CTV viewers on their mobile devices) or offline data? How is cookieless attribution supported? Marketers need all of these tools to run successful media campaigns — and you need to know whether the alternative ID is going to support those functions or slow them down.
Finally, marketers need to know the cost of using the alternative ID—and that includes the cost of using all of the tools involved in all of the activities above, whose costs can be quite significant.
The path forward
Advertisers face an uncertain cookieless future in 2025, but they are galvanized more than ever to identify a better path forward. Alternative IDs offer both short term opportunities and a sustainable path forward for those who experiment and focus their investigation on optimizing the balance within a golden triangle of scale, accuracy and interoperability. Meeting the criteria above should be table stakes and open an immediate opportunity to increase reach by more than 40% among highly desirable iPhone and other cookieless users, guaranteeing performance gains across the full marketing funnel.